


home by night

by fathomfive



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Curses, Friendship, Gen, Inarizaki, Mushishi inspired, supernatural epidemic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 02:29:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29769336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fathomfive/pseuds/fathomfive
Summary: The force of magic in the land has turned sour, exorcists are scrambling to protect their communities, and Kita Shinsuke is a cursebreaker with no sleep schedule to speak of. Around him the world grows stranger and more hostile, but he's not alone.A story about fire hazards, home cooking, magic hacks from the hundred-yen store, and ties that bind.
Relationships: Kita Shinsuke & Inarizaki Volleyball Club, Kita Shinsuke & Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu
Comments: 7
Kudos: 14





	home by night

Three minutes after sunset, Kita’s client lets him in by the garden gate. The light from the rear window outlines her moment of hesitation, hand on the latch.

“Kita-san?” she says.

He inclines his head. “Kita Shinsuke,” he says. “I’m sorry, but my grandmother was called away on urgent business this morning. She sent me in her place.”

“I—that’s all right,” she says. “I saw the email.” After another long moment she hustles him up the path and into the house, two hands to the door to muffle the sound.

Inside he swaps shoes for the slippers he’s offered, and pretends not to notice her sidelong glances. “Your grandmother,” she says. “Her techniques have a high success rate, or so I’m told. Is it really—” She cuts herself off, with a laugh that’s all nerves and no humor. He waits for her to stop.

“I’m not going to give you false hope,” he says. “But our method works. And in the end, I’ve never seen a curse that couldn’t be removed one way or another.”

Her face does a little involuntary wrinkle at _curse_ , like she wants to laugh again and save herself from having to believe him. She doesn’t laugh.

“Right,” she says instead, flat, quiet. “Come this way.”

She leads him up a narrow stair, to a landing where all the doors are shut. The ground floor was well-lit, but up here it’s dim and colorless, corners sunk in deep shadow. The lights throw weak grayish halos from their ceiling recesses. There’s a power strip and three mismatched lamps on the floor. They burn only weakly, as if through a fog.

His client moves slowly to the door at the end of the hall. The light barely reaches here, like it’s flinching back. “Yuki,” she calls. “Are you awake? I’m coming in.”

No answer. She eases the door open, and Kita follows her inside.

Two steps beyond the threshold, it’s impossible to see anything at all. A dead weight of shadow smothers the room, impossibly dark. There’s a shaky breath and a shuffle-click as she tries the light switch.

“It’s getting worse,” she says. “I leave the blinds open all the time now. I keep changing the bulbs. She’s always so tired. Sometimes I think there’s someone in here with her, going around the edges of the room—” She falters. “That part’s not real.”

“Call it an imprint,” Kita says. “Or an echo. Real, just not as real as everything else.” He swings his backpack onto his chest and gets out his lighter. It cuts a wobbly circle out of the dark. “Curses are heavy,” he says. “When they get too big they start to pull things out of shape around them.”

“Out of shape,” his client says. “It—stretches, is that what you’re saying?” A pause. “What happens when it tears?”

Kita lights a candle from the bundle in his bag. “It’s not going to get that far.”

He moves forward until his shins bump a low table. The light falls on a tumble of blankets, the pale curve of a face, two small hands upturned. He sets the candle down, nudges the soft shape of a stuffed animal aside, and perches on the edge of the bed. Yuki looks to be around eight or nine. She’s lying on her back, face slack, eyes shut. He steadies her head and gently pulls up her left eyelid. At the edge of the candlelight, her mother makes a choked sound.

“I saw,” she says. “When the doctor came. He called it a, what is it they say, a _marginal phenomenon_. I hate that term.”

“It’s a curse,” Kita says. “But you knew that already.”

Behind the pink and white of the girl’s eyelid is—nothing. Pure dark, as dense as the shadows in the room. The candle flame shrinks and shudders.

The darkest dark most people can imagine is the middle of the night. But even at night you have your allies: city lights and stars, campfires, candles. True dark is another thing entirely: a buried force as old as the land underfoot. And buried things always come forth eventually. Like fear or forgetfulness or hunger, or a hundred other pure and terrible things, it surfaces in the world as a curse, and finds a place to feed.

Kita lets go of Yuki and retreats to the door. “I can start right away,” he says. “In fact, I’d rather not waste any time. I’ll need you to leave the room.”

“Why? Is it going to hurt her?”

“That’s not really the concern. I can handle containment, but I need as clear an environment as possible.” The candle by the bedside is going out. Naked flame holds its own better than electric light, but it always loses the battle eventually. He lights two more candles, and his client backs reluctantly into the hallway, outlined by the struggling lamps. For a second he thinks she won’t shut the door. But she does, and her footsteps go a little way down the hall and then stop. Then it’s just Kita and his candles, and Yuki and her curse.

He sets his backpack down beside the bed. By trembling candlelight, he soaks a towel with the contents of his water bottle and presses it along the bottom of the door. Then comes the incense, three sticks burning in a stoneware holder. After that the spool of red thread, the sashiko-reinforced ribbon, the sandwich bag filled with beads and buttons and drilled chips of ceramic. And finally, the spirit jar he’s prepared for this occasion, because once you uproot a curse you need somewhere to put it.

Yuki stays where she is, her breathing nearly soundless in the darkened room. The dark breathes too, rising and falling like the flank of an animal.

Kita sifts through his shards and baubles, considering weight and resonance: a clay teardrop, a beaded phone charm, a length of jeweler’s chain. He slides them onto the thread one by one, and circles the room, tying the thread off to the anchors he finds. It’s never the same barrier twice. But years of practice have taught him the feeling of rightness he’s chasing with each assembly: the note in the vibration of taut string, the force that binds what must be bound and holds all other powers at bay. He closes the boundary with a careful knot, then twangs the stretched thread and listens to it hum.

The smoke is building, dense and spicy-sweet. He wraps the ribbon around and around his right palm, all the way down to the loop of red thread on his wrist. A deep breath, and hold. A long exhale. Repeat. The smoke grows heavy in his lungs. By the third inhale, he can see what he came for.

What fills the room isn’t just an absence of light. It’s a huge and breathing coil of darkness, bunched against the ceiling in cloudy ropes. It spills down the walls and blacks out the windows. It grows like a vine from Yuki’s empty eyes. By the light of the dying candles, Kita takes a last long breath. Then he goes to the bedside, and grabs the curse by the root.

It’s like trying to grip grease smoke, hot and oily and formless. Even through the ribbon it burns. But his tools do their work, bridging the gap between Kita and what he wasn’t born to see, and the curse struggles but it can’t break away. He locks his elbow and pulls. Something in his wrist clicks, and the curse spasms, and the whole smothering mass of shadow around him starts to move. He forces himself to breathe evenly, and steps backward.

His muscles burn. The tether stretches thin. The darkness heaves and shrinks, clinging desperately to its food source. And then—at last—the resistance vanishes. His shoulders hit the wall and light and color slide back into view in great smears: normal electric light, normal evening color. His eyes stream. A coil of inky darkness twitches in his hand.

“Who are you?” someone says, high and shocked. “What’s happening? Mom?”

Kita takes three steps from the wall, drops to his knees, and gropes for his spirit jar. He jams the curse inside, screws the lid down, and finds the loose ends of the red-thread lattice wrapped around it. He ties them off by touch and sits back on his heels, blinking hard.

“Yuki?” his client says. The doorknob clicks.

“She’s all right,” Kita says hoarsely. “Just a minute. I need to open the windows.”

The burning in his hand starts to subside. He lets the ribbon slide from his palm. It’s dark with ash, the stitch pattern marked out in indents on his skin. His fingers are red and stinging. He wipes his streaming eyes and refocuses.

“Hi,” he says. “I scared you a little, huh. Sorry about that.”

“Why are you in my room?” Yuki says, staring wide-eyed at him.

“Long story,” Kita tells her. “Your mom asked me to come and help.”

The streetlamp under the window glows fuzzy white. The bulb on the ceiling is yellow, shining through a frosted glass shade. The room is decked out in purple and blue, and crayon drawings decorate the walls. Kita eyes the stuffed animal. He still can’t tell what it is.

“It smells _bad_ in here,” Yuki says, and sneezes. Kita crosses the room and heaves the window open as far as it will go. It’s chilly outside, and the breeze whisks the last of the incense smoke away into the night.

Downstairs he collects payment in the form of an envelope of cash, a small bottle of sake, and a daikon the size of his forearm that his client presses on him with stubborn insistence. As proof of a finished job he shows her the spirit jar, bound in red thread.

“Is that a Doraemon thermos?” she says.

“It was on sale,” he says.

He straps his cargo into the milk crate on the back of his bike, checks the work orders on his phone, then it’s on to the next house. By dawn he rides in a halo of smoke, carrying six full thermoses. The warded storage room at home doesn’t have room for six more. He knew that when he set out last night, but stopping has never really been an option.

As the sun comes up he takes a shortcut through the business district, and meets Aran coming up along the river. Aran slides off his bike and jogs the last few steps to give him a thump on the shoulder in greeting. He’s bleary-eyed, coming off his own all-nighter, but since he has a bag of convenience store onigiri to share he looks to Kita like a divine messenger.

“West a few blocks first,” he says, while Kita turns his attention to breakfast. “And then along the river three kilometers or so. Suna went through yesterday and marked out the thin spots.”

They bike the route at an easy pace, and Kita stands watch while Aran renews the protective spells cast like a net over the neighborhood. Unlike Kita, he carries no tools of the trade. Instead he shakes his hands out like a pianist and traces signs with his fingers, on lampposts and house markers and that one vending machine that only ever has lemon tea. After a night breathing incense, Kita can see the silver fire that burns where he touches. It leaps up in a hot, sparkling veil around his head and hands, shifting with his breath, almost unbearably bright.

What Kita and his grandmother practice is a patchwork of borrowed power, assembled over generations: incense for the sight they lack, thread to bind and tokens to build with. What Aran practices is magic. Fire in the blood, an inheritance that needs no material aid or preparation. Lightning strikes where it will, curses fall on the unlucky—and some people are born to power like that.

Kita watches, and breathes fresh air until his vision fades to normal. Aran finishes up the last ward, traced along the glass panes of a bus shelter, then makes a face and dumps hand sanitizer onto his hands.

“I’ll go with you to Suna’s,” Kita tells him while he scrubs. “I want to touch base before tomorrow.”

“What,” Aran says. “You think he’s not ready?”

“He’s ready,” Kita says. “Everyone’s ready. I want them to know I’m ready.”

Aran barks with laughter, his head thrown back. “I guarantee you they know,” he says. “You’ll have a harder time convincing them you weren’t born ready.”

“As far as I know, I was born naked like everybody else,” Kita says.

“You know the only thing your jokes do is make you sound thirty years older,” Aran tells him. “You know that, right?”

Suna’s workspace is a studio downriver, in the old industrial part of town. Rent is cheap and people are too tired out by their commutes to pay attention to his comings and goings—which are, like most everything about him, peculiar. Aran called ahead, but he still cracks the door and eyes them assessingly over his surgical mask.

“You guys look beat,” he says, and undoes the chain latch. He heads back across the room, skirting the painted ribbon of protection charms that divides it from floor to ceiling. There’s a minifridge by the back wall, and he sorts through half-finished drinks and finds them a couple cans of coffee. The air is heavy with the strange tang of magic; burnt lemon peel and hot metal.

Aside from that fridge, there aren’t many creature comforts here. A beanbag chair, a couple shelving units rescued off the sidewalk. The protective barrier cuts away two thirds of the room, north to south. It’s punctuated by a half-circle lined like the spokes of a wheel, crammed with spellwork in Suna’s tidy hand. Suna crosses through the wheel, pausing for a count of three, and the air in the room wobbles as the protections cycle and reseal.

On the far side is a table crowded with distillation equipment and stacks of jars and dishes. Crushed stones and colored inks, used brushes, half-drawn sigils on test paper. The boiling flask is bubbling gently, its contents fuming up through a column packed with bits of colored glass. Ink for spellwork—if Kita were breathing incense, he’d be able to see it glow. As it is, the contents of the collection flask are just a little hard to look at. Heavy with a sidelong brilliance, as if struck by the sun.

He passes his spirit jars through the spell-lock, and Suna gives them each a curious shake. “Eh, you caught yourself a big one,” he says, holding Yuki’s curse up to his ear. “I only have a little of the denaturing compound left. I can deal with the small ones right now, but you’d better take this guy back home for storage.”

“I hate to push, but I was hoping you’d have some more compound to give me,” Kita says. “We’re running out of space in the clean room. Any more and we’re gonna lose thread integrity on the bindings.”

Containment is a temporary measure. The only true cure is destruction, and the only true destruction is by magic. Methods like Suna’s are the reason magicians mostly don’t burn out by age forty, but they come with their own complications.

Suna grimaces behind his mask. “Yeah, well,” he says. “Ingredients are short. They’ve been short for a while.” A shrug. He’s always matter-of-fact about the obstacles they face. “Sorry.”

“I’ll get rid of it,” Aran grunts. “Just—give me ten minutes and another coffee. And an aspirin for after.”

“Did you get any sleep last night?” Kita says.

“Did you?” Aran asks him.

“Ojiro-san,” Suna says, “I’m saying this with total respect for our ace cursebreaker: don’t even think about trying a bare-hands exorcism in my lab. I spent way too long on this setup to let you blow the wards out.”

“Hey, I don’t always do that,” Aran says. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “And I probably don’t have the juice for it today anyway. Shinsuke, quit making that face.”

“Don’t overtax yourself,” Kita says. “Save it for tomorrow.”

Aran bounces his knee. “Well,” he says. “What about the twins?”

What about the twins? The question isn’t what they’re capable of—once you’ve seen them in action, you know they’re not bound by the limitations of human magic. And the question isn’t whether they’re willing. The question is whether Kita’s willing to owe them any more than he already does. Dwindling resources, multiplying curses—he keeps on turning to them for help he’s not sure how to repay.

It’s one thing to trade favors with friends, but you don’t walk blind into deals with foxes.

“It’s gotta be you who asks,” Aran says.

“Yeah,” Kita says. He knows the rules. “I’ll go this afternoon.”

He and Aran gulp cold coffee, and Suna measures denaturing compound from an old tea bottle. There’s not much left, just a bluish slosh at the bottom. He pours it into a dish and touches a finger to the surface, as though setting a match to oil. Aran’s eyes move, tracking a silver flame that Kita can’t see.

Suna tips the activated compound into the jars. They hiss and rattle on the table, then go quiet as the curses inside dissolve into sludge. The room shimmers with heat haze as the barrier bleeds off the released energy. Condensation beads on the windowpanes.

Suna’s phone rings from their side of the room. He gestures lazily in their direction, and Kita reads the caller ID.

“Michinari? Suna’s busy at the moment,” he says.

“Hey, Shinsuke,” Michinari says, tinny and tired-sounding. “Me and Ren just finished up, I thought I’d call in with the map update. You want to take it for me, or is this a bad time?”

“It’s fine,” Kita says, going to the fading Japan tourism map tacked to the wall. It’s dotted with cheerful cartoons of temples and sakura trees. There’s a snow monkey with a smiling face, and a shinkansen with a smiling face, and clusters and clusters of pushpins. He reaches into the plastic bag taped to the bottom of the map, and grabs a few more. “Go ahead.”

“North Kakogawa, five cases of major darkness, up from two last week,” Michinari says. “South and southwest, the spread’s still contained by the Kako River, but the old city’s got something else going on. All the street trees in a three-kilometer block up and died overnight...”

Kita adds the pins. Suna has stopped working, and he and Aran watch in silence.

“You got all that?” Michinari says.

“Yeah,” Kita says. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Michinari says. “Must be looking pretty colorful up there by now.”

“It’s a regular picture,” Kita says. “Tell Ren I said hi.”

“Will do,” Michinari says. “We’re catching the train back this afternoon, we’ll see you soon.”

“Good,” Kita says. “Get some rest.”

“Don’t you know?” Michinari says, a smile in his voice. Not a particularly happy one, but some kind of smile at least. “No rest for the wicked.”

“Keep saying that and it’ll come true,” Kita says. He puts Suna’s phone back where he found it.

“Busy night,” Suna says again, looking at the map a moment longer before he turns back to his work.

Kita and Aran let themselves out, Kita waving off Aran’s offer of an early lunch. Instead he bikes home to his empty house, and phones his grandmother with his hip propped against the kitchen counter. Her voice, distant over the line, is deeply welcome. Tiredness hits him like a cliff’s slide into the sea.

“I’m a little late,” he says. “Sorry. We’re gearing up for tomorrow. Everyone’s dialed in, I think.”

“Good,” she says. “They know to listen to you.”

“When will you be back?” he says.

“I’m not sure,” she says. “It’s slow going. Nekomata’s open to sharing work, though, so I may come back with some new literature. We could learn a thing or two.”

“And they could learn a thing or two from you, I’m sure,” he says.

He can see into the workroom from here, where silk and wool roving are piled in the baskets beside the spinning wheel. Before he ever laid eyes on a curse, he learned to card and spin. And before he spun thread, he helped on dyeing day.

It was his job to carry the thread to the yard, and hang it up in bone-white hanks beside the vat. He and his grandmother gathered the strands and plunged them under. Dye sloshed up the sides of the vat, and the thread swam like a thousand filaments alight below the surface: the vein of everything she’d accomplished, everything she had to give to him. When they lifted and turned, it rose up red.

“Learn from me? Well, I’d like to think so,” she laughs. “They do things a little differently here, but the experts are still kicking. It’s good for me to remember how many ways there are to do it. What are you up to in the meantime?”

“Well,” he says. “We have a leftover from last night. I’m going to offer it to the twins.”

A pause. When she speaks again her tone is faintly wondering. “Those boys do like to interfere,” she says. “I suppose we’re lucky for that, in the end.”

“It worries you?” he says.

“It did, once,” she said. “Before I got to know them. But they’ve been good friends of the people. These days we need our friends more than ever.”

Neither of them says what they’re both thinking. That is is not the way it’s supposed to be: that the flow of power in the land turned at some point from a cycle to a sickness, and it shows no sign of stopping. They’re trying all the time to stanch a flow bigger than any of them.

“Take a picture at the Skytree for me,” he says instead. “I’ll see you soon.”

Six hours later, he wakes up in his dark room, stares at the ceiling until he remembers where he is, and staggers off to wash his face. Once he’s awake the rest of the way, he makes his usual check of the protections on the house. First the perimeter, where red thread winds near-invisibly along the fence. Then the thresholds, with their tidy red braids along the doorframes. Then the basement. It’s cool downstairs, raising goosebumps on his arms. In the clean room the shelves stand in their quiet ranks, latticed with red thread and crammed with sealed spirit jars. The air down here is unnaturally still, as tense and distended as the air in a balloon. He tightens knots, blows away dust, and with a needle works new thread into the ply of the fraying bindings.

There’s not much left of the day by the time he’s finished. He stashes Yuki’s curse in his backpack, and rides across the river in the gold of late afternoon.

There’s a small apartment complex in the old downtown, where the buildings are close and narrow and little parks crop up green in the spaces between them. Kita pauses for just a moment at the foot of the stair. He’s welcome here. He knows he’s welcome here. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is sovereign territory. He climbs the stair to the landing and knocks. There’s a grocery bag full of mandarins hanging on the handle.

Feet come thundering down the hall. There’s a muffled thump, a flurry of hissed voices, and then the door crashes against the rail. Kita, standing at prudent arm’s length, stays where he is.

Atsumu leans out the door, carefree affect mostly spoiled by the fact that his other hand is planted on Osamu’s chest. “Kita-san,” he says. “Shoulda called ahead so we could put the tea on.”

“We don’t have tea. We have hazelnut milk tea latte powder and it’s expired,” Osamu says.

“Do you want a hazelnut milk tea latte,” Atsumu says.

“Actually, I’m here to ask a favor,” Kita says, because it’s what he always says. Because you have to do it right. The twins zero in on him with matched focus. Atsumu stops shoving long enough for Osamu to swat his hand away.

“You better come inside,” Atsumu says. The twins step to either side of the door, and Osamu snags the bag of mandarins as Kita crosses the threshold.

There’s always some kind of gift on their doorstep. mandarins, or snacks from the corner grocery. A string of paper flowers on the rail. It might just be that there are a lot of grannies in the area who’ve imprinted on the twins, and their general air of being young men living independently and therefore five seconds from burning down their apartment at all times.

The trees in this neighborhood grow tall and fine. Old houses endure the seasons. Old families prosper here and call the place blessed. Not once in Kita’s memory has anyone been called to break a curse here. Not once in his grandmother’s memory, either.

In the little kitchen, Kita takes the spirit jar from his bag and sets it on the table. The twins eye it hungrily: that matched golden stare in duplicate. Not tawny brown, like he thought when they first met. The gold of an egg yolk, or a precious coin.

“Last night was busy,” he says. “We’ve taken care of the small fry, but we’re short on room and energy again—you know how it is. I’d appreciate it if you took care of this one for us.”

“Always so formal,” Atsumu says. His tone is light, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off the thermos. “You’re seriously not over that by now?”

“Not everyone forgets their manners after two seconds like a goldfish,” Osamu mutters, shoving an elbow into his side. “You’re projecting.”

Atsumu elbows back. “Who’s _projecting_.”

“We’re down to help, Kita-san,” Osamu says. “You know we always are.”

“Don’t look so serious!” Atsumu says. “It really is fine! You’ll just owe us big time, don’t worry about it.”

“When do I not?” Kita says.

He doesn’t think his face changed. But they look at him with sudden dismay, and Osamu jabs two fingers into Atsumu’s side.

“What is your _problem_ ,” he hisses. “You can’t shut your trap for one second? You gotta keep saying stuff?”

“I didn’t mean it like that!” Atsumu dodges another jab.

“Then how did you mean it, huh?”

“I owe you,” Kita says. “I know I do. Osamu, watch your elbows.”

Osamu swings wide and knocks a pepper grinder off the counter. While he’s busy trying to rescue it from behind the trash can, Atsumu scoots back out of reach and opens his hands toward Kita. Palms-up symmetry, an oddly ceremonial gesture.

“Seriously, though,” he says. “Ask and we answer, Kita-san. It’s good you came to us.”

Osamu replaces the pepper grinder, grumbling, and grabs a mandarin from the bag. He locks eyes with Doraemon while he peels. “What he said. ‘Tsumu, I’ll coin flip you for it.”

“No, hey, you had the last one,” Atsumu says. “Don’t act like you have any right to this one.”

“The last one doesn’t count,” Osamu says, eating his mandarin two slices at a time. “It wasn’t even a curse, just a misfired spell. Those aren’t filling at all.”

“But what did I eat that day, huh?” Atsumu says. “Leftovers. That curry.”

Osamu folds his arms. “Are you saying my curry’s no good? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m _saying_ ,” Atsumu says, showing his teeth, “this one’s rightfully mine. Right, Kita-san?” His head swings around eagerly, and Kita gets a full view of those teeth. His canines are long and sharp.

“I’ll flip the coin if this is so hard for you,” Kita tells them.

Atsumu wins on tails and shoots his brother a smug look. Osamu’s eyes have a covetous glint as he watches Kita hand over the thermos, but after a little grumbling he subsides. Atsumu unties the thread with deft fingers.

Kita used to be on edge every time he did it. These days, though, he trusts the twins to undo his work. Atsumu plunges a hand into the thermos and pulls out the curse, gripped in his fist. It thrashes in panic.

“Ooh,” he says. “ _Nice_ one.” Then he drops it into his mouth, and swallows it whole.

Osamu makes a low noise of envy. Atsumu wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looking supremely pleased, and when he catches Kita watching, he grins.

The oldest way to get rid of a pest is to feed it to something bigger.

“Ah, shit,” Osamu says. “We’re being bad hosts. You want to stick around awhile? I made mapo tofu last night.”

“You better say yes this time,” Atsumu says. “None of that ‘Oh, no thanks, I gotta rush home and polish all the faucets and drawer handles in my house,’ okay?”

“I do the fixtures on Sunday mornings,” Kita says.

Osamu snorts into his hand. Atsumu gives Kita a long indignant look. “Come on,” he says. “Take a load off for like ten seconds. We never see you guys anymore. It’s boring when no one comes around.”

Kita nods at the mandarins. “Looks like you had someone by earlier.”

“Yeah, well,” Atsumu says. “Gifts are their own thing, the neighbors don’t really—I just want to play Mario Kart with someone who’s not a super sore loser, okay?”

“You just want to try and beat Gin again,” Osamu says mercilessly. “What are you gonna do, make him duct tape one of his hands to his head? Give it up, man.”

“I’d stay, but I’ve got my hands full right now,” Kita tells them. “My grandmother went up to Tokyo to consult. I’ll be taking point on tomorrow’s job.”

The twins exchange a millisecond unreadable glance. “That’s big,” Atsumu says. “Congrats. I mean, not that you need it to prove anything, or anything.”

“Of course not,” Osamu says.

“No,” Kita says. And when he says it, he knows it to be true. He’s ready. He’s lifted a hundred and more curses from a hundred and more sufferers, with the wit he was given and the tools he was taught to fashion, and his own hands, which have no virtue but experience. Tomorrow he will lead the largest exorcism he’s ever been a part of. It’ll be different, but he’ll be fine.

“Well, tell everyone hi from us, I guess,” Atsumu says, crossing his arms. “You guys really should come over again. If you want.”

“Suna owes me money,” Osamu says.

“I owe Gin a Rainbow Road asskicking,” Atsumu says.

“We’d do more if we could,” Osamu says abruptly. “You know that, right? But we can’t do magicians’ work for them. This is as far as we can go.”

“The law runs both ways,” Kita says. “I know. But you don’t need to worry about us, we’ve been getting ready for this job for a while.”

“I don’t mean tomorrow,” Osamu says. “I mean everywhere. It’s out of balance, it’s not like it was back when all this was decided. Human magic and land magic and us in the middle, bound not to tip the scale directly—” Atsumu swats him between the shoulders. He rounds on his brother and they lock into a weird, fierce shared look.

Not so long ago, Kita and the others entered this house with gifts and excuses, if they entered it at all. Practitioners from the older generation still hold that people like the twins are there to watch over from afar, and to be watched in their turn. There is nothing, after all, that isn’t bound by something else. Lines between worlds, ties between friends.

But maybe even gods get tired of just watching.

He clears his throat. “We were going to get dinner afterwards,” he says. “All going well. You should come too.”

Osamu blinks. Atsumu blinks. Kita doesn’t. Osamu works his mouth and says finally, in a tone of voice Kita can’t quite identify, “Let me guess. You guys are going to parade into the closest Yoshinoya after it’s all over and scare the pants off them. All going well.”

“You have an opinion about Yoshinoya,” Kita observes.

Osamu blanches, then recovers. “Look,” he says. “If you’re gonna go exorcise a whole neighborhood, the least I can do is make you something good to eat after. It’s, what, Aran-kun and Suna? And Oomimi-san?”

“Plus Michinari and Ginjima,” Kita says. “That’s very generous, but we wouldn’t all fit in here.” He forges ahead before Osamu’s face can fall too far. “It’d have to be my place.” He gives himself a moment to enjoy the resulting silence.

“You sure?” Atsumu says finally. “Us, in your house? Your grandmother’s house? How would that even work?”

“Adjusting the protections is simple enough,” Kita says. “But if you’re not comfortable with it, it’s all right.”

“We’ll be there,” Osamu says.

“We want to be there,” Atsumu says, looking studiously at the wall behind Kita’s head.

“Yeah, so, cool, that’s settled,” Osamu says hurriedly. “I’ll bring my stuff over. Thanks. Make some space in your fridge and don’t die tomorrow.”

“I’m not going to die tomorrow,” Kita says.

They hover at his shoulder all the way to the door, and say their goodbyes with an ill-fitting seriousness. He stands alone on the landing for a moment. The door is thin. On the far side he hears the rustle of what’s probably a shoving match, cut-off mutters in tense voices. He should go. He shouldn’t eavesdrop.

“—just go anyway—”

“Aran-kun’s there if something goes really wrong—”

“—keep coming to us, can’t we—”

“—still binding—”

“—old law—isn’t _fair_.”

There’s an old, raw tension in their voices. Kita moves down the landing as quickly and as quietly as he can.

He cleans the kitchen that evening, with a mechanical focus that could carry him forever as long as he doesn’t stop. While he’s bent over the sink, scrubbing at the gunk around the drain, the thread around his wrist pulls tight. He wrings out the sponge, washes his hands, and makes it to the door just as the bell rings.

“Nice place you got here,” Atsumu says, peering shamelessly into the hall. “But I don’t think it likes us much.”

“No?” Kita says. “Out of curiosity, what does it feel like to you?”

“What else? String,” Osamu says, waving a hand around his face. “It’s like walking into a spiderweb.”

“Only tingly,” Atsumu says. “Like it’s gonna burn any second. Although it hasn’t, yet. Anyway, you said we could—”

“ _I_ could—”

“—’Samu could put some stuff in your fridge for tomorrow,” Atsumu says. “So, here we are.”

They’re both laden with paper shopping bags. “Short ribs in marinade, tofu, and some veggies,” Osamu says. “I wasn’t sure what you’d have. If it’s too much just say so and we’ll take some back.”

They set the bags down on the stoop, avoiding the threshold. There’s one more, bundled under Atsumu’s arm. He hesitates before reaching inside. “One more thing,” he says.

He pulls out an old festival lantern, its color faded, the paper foxed and shiny at the joints. He cradles it briefly and then opens it, combing out the tassel with his fingers. “The other guys can make their own lights,” he says. “So we brought one for you.”

He hands over the lantern. It really is cheap festival junk: the handle’s plastic with a peeling wood-grain decal. There’s an empty candle holder at the bottom, crusted with wax.

“You light it yourself,” Osamu says. “With a match or a lighter or something. That’s important. It’s not for magic finger-snapping.”

“And why is that so important?” Kita says. “What is this, really?”

“Uh, it’s a lantern,” Osamu says, deliberate obtuseness being one of his greatest strengths.

“It’s us definitely not violating any statute of non-intervention in magicians’ affairs as they pertain to the relationship between humanity and the forces inherent in the land,” Atsumu says, with an air of recitation. “We’re a super neutral third party and we have total respect for whatever laws we may have been bound to in the past. Anyone asks, you can tell them that.”

“So,” Osamu says evenly, “it’s lucky you’re not a magician, Kita-san.”

“Keep coming to us,” Atsumu says abruptly. “Not just for yourself. When you—when any of you need us, it has to be you who comes. We’ll help.”

“You don’t want to be in debt,” Osamu says, more quietly. “We get it. You think we want to hold you like that? But there’s no way around it.”

Kita turns the lantern over in his hands. It barely weighs anything. “Something I’ve learned doing this job,” he says, “Sometimes there’s no point in going around. You have to go straight through.” He sets the lantern down, just inside the door, and stands there for a moment looking down at it.

It’s not so bad to owe things—of course. It’s not so bad to have to be grateful.

“Thank you,” he says. “Wait here a second, okay?”

He goes to the workroom, and brings back a spool of red thread. It’s soft and thoughtlessly familiar to his hands, but they stare like it’s something startling. “I’ll give you something else, if you want it,” he tells them. “And anyway, if you’re going to use the kitchen tomorrow you have to be able to come through the door without tearing up the barrier.”

He reels a piece of thread from the spool, snaps it off with his teeth, and carries it into the yard. The twins have one of those caught-gaze conversations, silent and intent, and Atsumu holds out his right hand.

Standing there on the heels of his shoes, Kita ties a careful knot. Atsumu reclaims his hand and rolls the thread under his forefinger. Kita pulls another length for Osamu.

“I wouldn’t try to bind you to anything,” he says. “But you’re welcome in our house.”

Atsumu presses his knuckles to his mouth and grumbles something unintelligible. Osamu laughs once, bright and loud. Then he lets Kita tie the knot.

Later, Kita paces the perimeter of the yard and rebinds the protections to accommodate the new ties. At the gate by the roadside he hooks a finger under the taut thread, tugs, and listens for the hum as it pops back into place.

He goes to bed early that night. Well, he gets in bed early that night. He lies awake doing inventory in his mind, thinking over the plans they’ve made. The paper lantern sits at his bedside, empty belly, the wire frame partially collapsed. He wakes in the luminous blue hour before dawn, and checks his supplies one last time. A lot of people are depending on him today. In that sense it’s just like every other day.

He bikes to the river and follows its course south, with a thin, cold breeze in his face. Just before he and the water part ways, he catches movement up and to his left. Two foxes, sitting like sentinels on the bank opposite. They watch him until he’s out of sight.

Aran meets him at the bridge, and they go on to the meeting point together. The others show up not long after: Michinari at a light jog, Gin doing his best to match Ren’s unhurried pace, Suna toting his duffel bag of experimental equipment. At their backs the sky is shading toward translucent gray. But in the neighborhood ahead, the light dies over the rooftops and is swallowed up in darkness.

There’s a stillness deader than predawn laid over them. No birdsong, no cars starting, no sound of windows or doors. No voices. The dark between the buildings is absolute. It aches to look at, blurred around the edges.

“Whew,” Michinari mutters. “Got to be forty, fifty people by now.”

“Last estimate forty-seven,” Aran says. “But not all the families who went to hotels would talk to me.”

They make their last checks: maps and protection charms, water bottles and energy bars. And Kita’s own little ritual: silently, privately, he makes sure the red threads around his friends’ wrists show no sign of fraying. He tied them all himself, months or years ago.

“You know your sectors,” he tells them. “Step carefully, it's going to be more thin spots than not in there. Tell your partner as soon as you see anything that might not be real. Keep an on the check-in schedule. Anything else before we go in?”

Aran lets the tense silence live for about a second and a half. “Actually, one thing,” he says. “I call first dibs on whatever Osamu's making for dessert.”

“You can’t call _dibs_ ,” Ren says, brutally patient. “What did you do to deserve dibs?”

“I’m about to do it,” Aran says securely. “I heard it was some kind of cake, so.”

Gin snorts with nervous laughter. “Sponge cake, you think? You're putting us in a tough spot here.”

“Yeah,” Suna drawls. “It almost seems like you’re trying to test the limits of our respect for you, or something.”

“It’s cheesecake,” Kita says. “If I thought you could call dibs I would call dibs.”

The talk peters out after they cross the street. On the sidewalk just beyond the sprawl of shadow, Kita opens the twins' lantern and sets a match to the candle. The flame leaps up, shedding warmth in a staticky burn that prickles his skin and sinuses. Alive and almost caustic, like no fire he’s ever lit before-anyway, he got the candle in a pack from the hundred-yen store. Whatever this power is, it comes from somewhere else.

“Fancy,” Suna says, an odd edge to his grin. “How much of your soul did you sell for a light like that?”

“About a dinner’s worth,” Kita says. He combs the tassel out with the same care Atsumu used. Then he steps forward, into the dark.

Even with the lantern it presses in on him: a corpse-weight, a collapsed roof, a meter of black soil. The world beyond the lantern is all textured motion and no light, swelling, breathing: the other side pressing against the membrane where the dark wears it thin. Like land riddled with sinkholes, no one really knows where you go if you fall in. But you'd be a fool not to realize it's possible. His friends find their way by silver fires he can’t see. They split off at the junctures Kita designates, counting the steps between landmarks.

Aran is Kita’s partner today. Later, he will note that they worked for seven hours. But in the dark it all runs together: going into houses, hands outstretched to touch the walls; finding the people sitting or lying still as dolls and cutting them free of the hungry dark. The lantern burns impossibly through the long hours. It’s not the silver of witchfire but a bloody red-gold glow, like light behind a vein.

Aran never goes far from him. He doesn’t say it, but Kita knows he holds himself responsible, as the last line of defense if Kita’s skills fail him.

Kita’s skills will not fail him. Magic is an inheritance you can’t control, but craft can be passed between even the most ordinary of hands. It’s a sturdy thing in that way. It will not fail him. It does not, cannot fail him.

He's half-hunched in someone's living room, shoulder under the arm of a middle-aged man, lowering them both down to the floor. There's a headache pounding behind his eyes. His hands are blistered and stinging. Light seeps through the gaps in the blinds, and he folds a leg underneath himself and stares at it. Feet thump on the stairs. Aran comes into the room, supporting an elderly woman.

“Shinsuke,” he says. “The sun's out. We did it. We're done.”

They take the bus back. Nine stops southbound in near-silence, Michinari bouncing his leg mechanically, Ren with his head down and his headphones in, Gin pinching the bridge of his still-bleeding nose. Suna hunches like a scavenger over the bag in his lap, stuffed with clinking spirit jars and the debris of fieldwork. Aran puts his chin on his chest, and to all appearances goes right to sleep. Kita folds his hands in his lap and waits. It feels like he’s sliding back down a dark hall, getting far away.

The bus hiss-groans to a halt at their stop. They pile off into the winding streets of Kita’s neighborhood. He has a moment of startlement when he sees the lights on in his house, burning against the onset of evening.

“Oh, man,” Ren mutters, stretching both arms over his head. “About time.”

Kita opens the door and watches his friends, their tired shuffle and polite greetings as they cross the threshold. Something clangs and Atsumu pops out of the kitchen in an incongruously orange apron.

“Wow, finally,” he says. “Sound off, everyone alive? Who wants ribs?”

No one sounds off that they’re alive, preferring to jump straight to “Yes please,” and “tell Osamu he’s my favorite,” and “oh my god is that what I smell?” Atsumu advances, hesitates, then elbows his way into their midst, poking with the handle of the spoon he’s holding like he has to make sure for himself that everybody’s in one piece. “You guys are ripe,” he announces. “Get cleaned up, I’m not eating next to that.”

“You’re not eating at all unless you get back in here and keep an eye on the stove,” Osamu says from the doorway.

“I was gone for ten seconds,” Atsumu groans. “It didn’t boil over in the last three hours, it’s not gonna boil now.”

Osamu crosses his arms. With the sensible blue apron and the shoulder towel and the glower he looks competent and very unrelated to his brother. “We serve the meat,” he says. “Not the other way around. Get in there.”

Kita, Suna, and Michinari stow their cargo of bound curses in the family-sized cooler Suna set up for temporary storage. It has his trademark hand-inked seals around the lid, and the spirit jars float in a bath of some cloudy fluid that makes the hair on Kita’s arms stand up when he touches it. Meanwhile a line forms for the bathroom. Kita foregoes his place and heads into the kitchen, but Osamu makes emphatic X-hands before he can open his mouth to offer help. “No,” he says. “No, no. All due respect, Kita-san, but _no_. My kitchen, tonight.”

“I can at least take the trash out,” Kita says, unperturbed.

“Can you teach ‘Samu how to talk in full sentences,” Atsumu says.

“’Tsumu will take the trash out,” Osamu says, a king issuing a decree. “Kita-san, you look like you’re gonna fall over. Go meditate or whatever it is you do.”

“I’ll help you with the table settings,” Kita says. Atsumu and Osamu pin him with identical put-upon expressions.

“I’ll set the table,” Atsumu says, virtuous and pained.

“Yes you will,” Osamu says.

Kita gives it a moment. Uncharacteristically, the twins don’t weaken. “All right,” he says. “How long do you think?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes,” Osamu says. “Let everyone know.”

Kita retreats upstairs to find a clean shirt and take care of his blistered hands. His friends talk and move around under his feet in a low murmur. It holds him there, tethered under the cold white bathroom light. He peels open bandages and balls the wax paper in his fist. He doesn’t float away. He’s here where he belongs.

When he heads back down he finds Michinari in the hallway stretching his calves, Ren hovering while Aran hogs the bathroom, and Suna prowling around the workroom while Gin says things like “uh, are you sure you should touch that?”

“I’m just looking,” Suna says, spinning the hand crank on the carding machine. He pinches a stray fluff of fiber from the teeth and examines it like it’s hiding secrets from him specifically.

“ _Finally_ ,” Ren says out in the hallway, and Aran mutters something unintelligible and indignant. Michinari folds his legs to his chest, rocks forward, and stands minus some of his usual limberness.

“Please say it’s time to eat,” he says.

“More or less,” Kita says. “Let’s see if we can bring anything out to the table.”

They crowd into the kitchen, which smells like heaven come down to earth, and somehow manage to make it out to the little dining room bearing cups and chopsticks, bowls of rice, dishes of sauce, pickles and beer and tea and salad, and ribs glistening with a thin, orange-flecked sauce.

“Ah,” Osamu says, nudging a salad bowl, changing his mind, relocating two beers and a chopstick rest, and finally setting down the last bowl of rice. “Maybe I overdid it.”

“You did it the right amount,” Gin says fervently. “Exactly right, I think.”

Osamu beams, which is at first hard to recognize because his eyebrows go up a little and his mouth turns up a little and he just looks fully awake instead of the usual. “I figured you guys are fine with spicy, so the marinade’s got some kick,” he says. “It’s just sobacha in the teapot, so you can sleep. Lemme know about the dressing, I haven’t tried this one before.”

Aran gives a happy little sigh. Suna leans over the table, his eyes darting from dish to dish. Little by little, everyone turns to Kita.

“Thank you for the food, Osamu, Atsumu,” he says. He even manages not to look at the ribs while he’s saying it. He rests his hands on the table, facing his friends—he knows just what his hands look like, dye-stained, against that familiar grain. “Good work today, everyone. Let’s eat.”

Ren and Aran echo him almost in unison, then the others, voices overlapping in a familiar murmur that gives way quickly to the clink of dishes. Kita pours tea and just holds it for a minute, letting the steam cloud his vision. When he exhales it drifts away and there’s the room, lit and crowded close. Somebody’s put pickled vegetables at his elbow. Osamu’s cutting into the ribs with careful precision. Aran pops the lid of a beer bottle with one thumb. Kita breathes, and breathes, and feels the seam of the cushion he’s sitting on, and smells warm rice, and the light over all of it does not fade.

Osamu serves him ribs melting with sauce that runs into the rice. Ren hands him a beer. Suna catches his eye and lifts his cup in the world’s laziest toast. Kita returns the gesture; now that he’s got food on his plate he’s not putting more than twenty percent of his attention anywhere else.

The beef is tender, tangy, with a sizzling red-orange brightness cut by little slivers of green onion. All Kita’s breath goes out in one soundless collapse. He pushes the rice into the sauce and eats with his head down until his bowl is empty. He only has to lift it a little before the ribs are being served around again: Atsumu this time, still in his shock-orange apron with a smear of salad dressing down the front.

“I think you did good,” Atsumu says, quiet, meant just for Osamu. Osamu nods decisively, still chewing.

Kita turns his attention to his bowl again. Leave tomorrow’s work for tomorrow. Everyone else will. When they pick it up they’ll pick it up together like always, shared hand to hand to cut the weight. And maybe they’ll have leftovers for lunch.

**Author's Note:**

> I came up with this au in 2019 for a nohebi fic I never started, and wrote the first couple drafts of this in early 2020. a month later I put it down and sprinted in the other direction for probably obvious reasons. I ended up coming back to it because I have a lot of feelings about textile arts, food, and that Kita-with-the-lantern imagery Furudate's always throwing around. also because red string is my favorite multipurpose metaphor and I WILL beat it to death
> 
> this fic draws pretty heavily on Mushishi, especially its first story, "The Light of the Eyelid," and on this video: [In Search of Forgotten Colours - Sachio Yoshioka and the Art of Natural Dyeing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OiG-WjbCQA)


End file.
